Beyond catalyzing changes in what we do, technology affects how we think. The Internet has emerged as a new context for self-exploration and social encounter; psychopharmacology, robotics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence -- all are technologies that raise fundamental questions about selfhood, identity, community, and what it means to be human.

With the support of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self was founded in 2001 by Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology. The Initiative's goal is to be a center for research and reflection on the subjective side of technology and to raise the level of public discourse on the social and psychological dimensions of technological change.

From 2001-2004 the Initiative hosted working groups and symposia and was home to foundation-sponsored research projects. Currently, Initiative focus is on a teaching program in the fall and spring semesters of 2008/2009, a research program on "nurturant technologies" supported by the Intel Corporation, and the publication of four books on technology and self with the MIT Press:

•   Evocative Objects: Things We Think With

•   Falling for Science: Objects in Mind

•   The Inner History of Devices

•   Simulation and Its Discontents

Each of these books, edited and with introductory essays by Sherry Turkle, reflects an aspect of the Initiative's program. Evocative Objects is an outgrowth of a seminar series by the same name; Falling for Science speaks to issues addressed by a Spencer Foundation grant on adolescence, technology, and identity; The Inner History of Devices draws on the research themes of the range of Initiative working groups and on research sponsored by an Intel Corporation grant on "Nurturant Technologies"; Simulation and its Discontents reports on a National Science Foundation study of simulation and professional identity.